Day: January 18, 2026

Crypto Scams, Hacks Drained Over $4B in 2025

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Scam losses jumped 64% year over year, driven by tailored phishing and impersonation campaigns targeting high-value victims. Crypto-related scams and hacks drained more than $4.04 billion from users and platforms in 2025, according to data shared by blockchain security firm PeckShield. The figures point to a clear shift toward targeted social engineering and attacks on centralized players, with scams alone rising far faster than technical exploits. Scams and Centralized Attacks Drove 2025 Losses PeckShield said total crypto losses in 2025 rose about 34% from 2024, with $2.67 billion tied…

Vitalik Buterin Calls for ‘Garbage Collection’ to Curb Ethereum Bloat

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is urging developers to confront the protocol bloat driven by an endless push to add new features while rarely removing old ones. In a Sunday post on X, Buterin argued that true trustlessness and self-sovereignty depend less on raw decentralization metrics and more on simplicity. “Even if a protocol is super decentralized with hundreds of thousands of nodes, and it has 49% byzantine fault tolerance, and nodes fully verify everything with quantum-safe peerdas and starks, if the protocol is an unwieldy mess of hundreds of thousands…

Crypto’s Decentralization Falls Apart at Interoperability: Casper CTO

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Moving value across blockchains is now largely mediated by a small group of centralized intermediaries despite crypto’s long-standing claims of decentralization. Michael Steuer, president and chief technology officer of Casper Network, framed this dynamic as a structural outcome of the industry’s approach to interoperability and user experience. With a background spanning mobile gaming, enterprise software and early blockchain development, Steuer approaches the industry’s interoperability problem as a question of how real users interact with technology. “For some reason, in crypto, it’s perfectly acceptable to ask users to care about things…

80% of Hacked Crypto Projects Never Fully Recover, Expert Warns

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Nearly four out of five crypto projects that suffer a major hack never fully regain their footing, according to Mitchell Amador, CEO of Web3 security platform Immunefi. Amador told Cointelegraph that most protocols enter a state of paralysis the moment an exploit is discovered. “Most protocols are fundamentally unaware of the extent to which they are exposed to hacks, and are not operationally prepared for a major security incident,” he said. According to Amador, the first hours after a breach are often the most damaging. Without a predefined incident plan,…

EU Calls Emergency Meeting, Democrats Move to Block Trump’s Tariffs, But BTC Stays Calm

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According to analysts, the tariff war between the US and the EU is on step 4 out of 10 now. After several countries from the European Union deployed troops to the most recent hot zone, Greenland, the POTUS announced a new set of tariffs against all of them, effective from February 1 until a deal for the complete acquisition of the island is reached. The EU’s response was immediate, while US Democrats have pushed to introduce legislation to block Trump’s proposed tariffs. Despite all this drama, BTC’s price has…

We Asked 4 AIs Where XRP Is Headed Next Week

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What lies ahead for XRP next week? It has been an eventful start to the new year on both the macro and crypto fronts, with the US at the center of global controversy, and some assets reacting with expected volatility. Ripple’s cross-border token became one of the top performers during the first week, going from under $1.90 to $2.40 in the span of days. However, it was rejected there and now struggles below $2.10, which means a minor decline on a weekly scale. To gain a further perspective on…

China-Led CBDC Platform mBridge Tops $55 Billion in Transaction Volume

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China-led cross-border digital currency platform mBridge has processed more than $55 billion in transactions as efforts to build payment rails that operate outside traditional dollar-based systems find momentum. Project mBridge, a multi-central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform, has now settled over 4,000 cross-border transactions with a cumulative value of roughly $55.5 billion, according to data compiled by the Washington-based Atlantic Council. That figure marks a nearly 2,500-fold increase since the project’s early pilot phase in 2022. The platform is currently being tested by central banks in mainland China, Hong Kong,…

XRP Funding Rates Point To Possible Price Breakout

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Semilore Faleti is a cryptocurrency writer specialized in the field of journalism and content creation. While he started out writing on several subjects, Semilore soon found a knack for cracking down on the complexities and intricacies in the intriguing world of blockchains and cryptocurrency. Semilore is drawn to the efficiency of digital assets in terms of storing, and transferring value. He is a staunch advocate for the adoption of cryptocurrency as he believes it can improve the digitalization and transparency of the existing financial systems. In two years of active…

ETH Validator Exit Queue Hits Zero as Staking Demand Soars

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The massive staking inflows are strengthening ETH’s supply-demand dynamic, potentially setting the stage for upward price momentum this year. The Ethereum staking validator exit queue has dropped to zero — signaling a dramatic fall in selling pressure and strengthening confidence in Ether (ETH) as a yield-bearing asset. Data from Ethereum Validator Queue shows the exit queue has fallen from its September 2025 peak of 2.67 million Ether (ETH) to 0 ETH, while the entry queue has risen more than fivefold over the last month to 2.6 million ETH, the highest…

Solana Labs CEO Says Solana Must Adapt or Die

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Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said he wants Solana to be a constantly evolving network, continuously updating to meet the changing needs of users, contrasting with Vitalik Buterin’s vision of Ethereum as a self-sustaining blockchain. “Solana needs to never stop iterating. It shouldn’t depend on any single group or individual to do so, but if it ever stops changing to fit the needs of its devs and users, it will die,” Yakovenko stated in a post to X on Saturday. His remarks were in response to a post from Buterin,…